Today is the final day! It’s almost the one year anniversary of DTNS and Friday’s resident artprov artist Len Peralta is doing something special to mark the occasion. He’s drawing a poster called “In This Together” and you have a chance to be drawn into the print. There are only 26 slots left. If you want to get drawn into this piece of DTNS history, go to Len’s Patreon page: patreon.com/len and pledge at the $2.50 level or higher. Len will draw you into the print + you’ll also get a copy of it as well. Once again, that URL is patreon.com/len

ReCode reports US FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is afraid of dogs. Wheeler told reporters Friday “Look, the big dogs are going to sue regardless of what comes out. We need to make sure we have sustainable rules.” He was trying to explain why no new proposals have come from the FCC regarding Open Internet Guidelines since President Obama suggested reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the Teleocmmunications Act of 1934.

the_big_endian sends us an NDTV report that according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International, the number of people online in India will reach 302 million by the end of this year, overtaking the US and its 279 million users as the second-largest Internet market in the world. As of the end of October, 278 million people are online in India with 159 million accessing the internet on mobile phones. China is still the largest Internet market with more than 600 million Internet users.

Technosquid sent us this one: “My pick is the new Brandon Sanderson audiobook, Legion: Skin Deep, available free for pre-order on audible.com, set for release on November 24th. Legion: Skin Deep is the sequel to Legion, a novella which gained some popularity when it was available free to purchase from audible for a month or two back in 2012 (now $4.86 for audible subscribers, $6.95 for non subscribers, or $2.99 kindle + $1.99 whispersync for audio audible add-on.)

“Stephen Leeds, AKA ‘Legion,’ is a man whose unique mental condition allows him to generate a multitude of personae: hallucinatory entities with a wide variety of personal characteristics and a vast array of highly specialized skills.”

I really liked the original, although it was only a short two-hour reading of a 96 page story, but thankfully the sequel is more than twice as long.

In a blog post, the author noted that this is a limited-time promotion, and after one month it would no longer be available for free, but of course anyone who purchased it during the promotion would have it available in their audible libraries.”

Email from Ted Dushane
Dear Tom & Jenny,

As a physician and mathematician, I’ve worked with physiological monitors for the last 30 years. I’ve used both invasive and non-invasive monitors in the OR and ICU. In addition, I’ve consulted with Philips Medical Systems (formerly HP medical) since the early 90s about these monitors.

Here are a few observations I’d make from my experience and expertise:

• work on measurement of non-invasive blood pressure has resulted in the following quandry: the healthier and more stable the patient, the better the devices work. Also, the sicker and more unstable the patient, the more unreliable they become. In other words, when you most need the information, these devices give you the worst data. Many engineers working for companies from startups to GE and Philips have tried, and the state of the art is still mediocre.

• oxygen saturation monitors are an excellent example of this same quandry: they cannot pick up a signal in patients with really poor circulation, even when awake.

• There are, today, no good heart rate (HR) monitors that will pick up HR reliably from the wrist when a patient is running during a serious workout. You need a band around the chest (or EKG pads), and only a few devices with a chest band work well. The general rule follows: If a patient is sauntering or barely jogging, the wrist devices are adequate.

I am skeptical about claims that we will have HR monitoring through ear buds.

• claims have been made that sensors to measure blood glucose in tears (using some sort of contact lens sensor) will be “within 30%.” That’s what we call a really dangerous device. That’s disinformation that is worse than no information. No nurse or physician would want to base a clinical decision on numbers like that.

In general, the claim seems to be that it’s trends information that will be used, even if the accuracy of individual data points is low. What we’ve learned about physiological monitors is that most technologies, even with high precision, have variable and unpredictable inaccuracies. The biases can change depending on patient characteristics in a way that makes it hard to estimate the true value, so much so that the observed trends may be incorrect–not just the individual data points.

Finally, all the work to develop these monitors has been for the controlled environments of the hospital; efforts have been made to make devices less bulky but the engineers have *not* had to meet the severe miniaturization requirements of today’s fitness bands, nor have they had to be concerned about making their monitors cheap enough for a mass market.

If you all are interested, I’d love to share some more about why I think serious caution is appropriate. As I see it, errors in monitoring our bodies need to be treated differently from, say, inaccurate Google analytics.